Nearly all commercial broadcast radio and television channels present programs, such as movies, entertainment series episodes, news programs, sporting events, and the like, separated by, and possibly interspersed with, short advertisements, commercial messages, or other interstitial segments of content. Typically, the scheduling of these interstitial segments is not known well in advance to the general public. Instead, only the programs are listed in a program listing, or electronic program guide (EPG), that a viewer may access, such as by way of a satellite or cable television receiver, or “set-top box”.
Every so often, a viewer may be interested in the content of a commercial being presented or displayed, such as the identity of a product or service, a mailing address of an associated company, a World Wide Web address, a telephone number, or the like, by which a viewer may learn more about the product or service. However, given the brevity of most commercial messages, the viewer may easily miss the desired content of the message. As a result, the viewer may wish to save the content of the commercial for later viewing. To that end, the viewer may record the program that contains the commercial, such as by way of digital video recorder (DVR) functionality resident in the set-top box or a standalone unit. However, when the viewer initiates a recording operation of the current program, the entire program from at least the current time until the scheduled end of the program is normally recorded, requiring the viewer to search through the recorded program to find the commercial of interest. Other program content prior to the commercial may also be recorded. Additionally, if the viewer attempts to retrieve the commercial well after the recording date, the viewer may not remember which recorded program of several such recorded programs stored in the DVR contains the desired commercial.